Soaps are widely used as skin cleansers, cleaning skin effectively and economically. However, they are not particularly mild. Soaps irritate skin, resulting in reddening, roughening and dryness. Therefore, materials which can counteract the irritating effects of soap, including moisturizers, synthetic surfactants and silicones are commonly included in the formulation of a soap bar.
Silicones have long been known to provide a light, silky feel on hair and skin. However, when silicones are incorporated in bar soaps, they have a tendency to wash off along with the soap, leaving no silicone residue on the skin. When silicones are added to bar soaps in the form of fluids, they tend to become emulsified and the emulsion is washed away with the lather of the soap. Therefore, even very viscous fluids fail to provide the sensory benefits of silicones when applied through bar soaps. Compositions containing silicones also show reduced lather formation.
Surprisingly, it has now been discovered that when a blend of a fatty alkyl modified silicone, a fatty silicate ester, a high viscosity fluid silicone, a silicone surfactant and a nonionic/cationic/anionic organic surfactant are incorporated in a bar soap, enough silicone is deposited on the skin surface to provide superior sensory benefits while maintaining the lathering and cleaning properties of the soap. Further, the film deposited is not highly stable, so an undesirable build up of silicone on the surface over time is avoided.
The present composition offers the flexibility to incorporate the silicones using nonionic, cationic and anionic surfactants in bar soap formulations based on very different oil-based raw materials. The composition can be used as an emulsion and added to soap noodles or converted to a granular additive with conventional fillers and added directly to soap during amalgamation. The practical difficulty of mixing high viscosity fluids during soap manufacture is therefore overcome.
The use of silicones in cleansing bar compositions has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,154,849 to Visscher et al., issued Oct. 13, 1992 and in U.S. Pat. No. 5,661,120 to Finucane et al., issued Aug. 26, 1997. The silicones disclosed, however, are difficult to incorporate in a soap bar because of their high viscosity. The art does not suggest a blend of long chain substituted silicones and short chain substituted silicones with organic surfactants.